The Givenness of Things: Sermons by James A. Callahan

This collection offers selected sermons of Jim Callahan, Rector of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church from 1982-2000, Irish poet priest, teller of tales, and advocate for ministry of Outreach. These very literary sermons include words from theological figures like Diedrich Bonhoeffer and Frederich Buechner, and from Shakespeare, Dickens, Frost, Cormac McCarthy, to name a few, and, perhaps most powerfully, characters Jim loved to talk about, his notorious Uncle Henry and Aunt Sue Belle and Mama Jesse and myriad others whom he brings to life in the course of celebrating our human experience of the Gospel.His is a theology of incarnation, of the way that the trinity of joy, sorrow, and love is the story of our life. The title echoes a phrase from these pages and which speaks to our willingness to embrace the joys and pains of which we live in the midst. As Jim puts it, ＂For apart from that world-the givenness of things-you and I have no being and make no sense. For it is just the givenness of things-this sadness and sorrow, this all too fleeting pleasure, this boredom and fear and terror, and this laughter and these tears-that are the thick of it into or out of which God speaks.＂

Lisa Plummer Crafton is a Professor of English (British Romanticism) at the University of West Georgia.